Codex Sinaiticus: Its Entrance Into the Mid-Nineteenth Century Text-Critical Environment and Its Impact on the New Testament Text

chapter 14 Codex Sinaiticus: Its Entrance into the Mid-Nineteenth Century Text-Critical Environment and Its Impact on the New Testament Text

The reunification and digitization of Codex Sinaiticus, followed recently by [53] a magnificent printed facsimile, was celebrated appropriately by the Codex Sinaiticus Conference at the British Library.* All of this represents a remark- ably significant achievement, and congratulations and thanks are due to all who played a role in making this manuscript treasure accessible virtually ev- erywhere in the world, and for all time to come. Such broad availability could not have been imagined over the long history of the Codex, but now cur- rent technology has offered the luxury and convenience of viewing any and every portion of the manuscript online, thereby facilitating and enriching our scholarship. While completing my dissertation research on Codex Bezae around 1960, the Harvard libraries offered everything that one might wish, except exami- nation of that manuscript itself. At the time, it was quite unthinkable that a graduate student might travel to the other Cambridge to confirm a reading or a correction – facsimile editions would have to serve those functions. When the digitisation of Codex Sinaiticus is replicated for numerous other biblical and related manuscripts, such journeys again will be diminished, for the manuscripts will travel to us in an instant. Nevertheless, there is still only one Codex Sinaiticus, and it will be visited at the British Library by many, if only so they might say that they have actually seen the real thing – the genuine original! At the same time, however, the comment of Theodore Cressy Skeat – more than seventy years ago, after he had worked four years on Codex Sinaiticus with H. J. M. Milne – remains to be tested: “Even where the manuscript is in per- fect preservation, inspection of the facsimile can never give the same absolute certainty as a glance at the original.”1

* Originally the keynote address for the Codex Sinaiticus Conference at the British Library in London, 6 July 2009. It is presented here with revisions and additions. See the Appendices for tables that will assist in sorting out the complex data. Regrettably only New Testament materials can be treated in this essay, though much also may apply, if only in principle, to the Septuagint. 1 Theodore C. Skeat, “Four Years’ Work on the Codex Sinaiticus,” Daily Telegraph (London) 11 January (1938), reprint in The Collected Biblical Writings of T. C. Skeat (ed. J. K. Elliott;

The present exploratory essay consists largely of observations about the history into which Codex Sinaiticus emerged when it came to light in the mid- nineteenth century, followed by an assessment of its rôle in modern New Testament textual criticism. Many names and dates will appear in this histori- cal exercise, as it attempts to determine ‘Who knew what?’ And when, where, and how did they know it? And what did they do about it? Finally, how did that environment affect Codex Sinaiticus and how did Sinaiticus influence that climate?

1 Introduction

The texts of Judaism and Christianity were transmitted through hand-written copies of copies of copies, opening to scholars the fascinating and often frus- trating world of textual criticism, and such manuscripts and their variants [54] constitute the ‘stuff’ of textual criticism. John Fell in 1675 claimed to have uti- lized one-hundred manuscripts in forming his Greek New Testament – the first to be published in Oxford. Thirty years later John Mill used a similar number of manuscripts, though he emphasized their variations much more than Fell had done, and Mill’s massive edition contained some 30,000 variant readings. Though this was unsettling to many in the church of his time, today there are some 5,500 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament writings, plus thousands of versional documents and Patristic citations. Together these sources contain some large fraction of a million variants that must be adjudicated as textual critics seek the earliest attainable text and also assess what the myriad mean- ingful variations can tell us about the developing Christianities prior to the debut of the printing press. Whenever even a single manuscript of an ancient writing exists, textual criticism comes into play, for that manuscript will contain scribal errors to be discerned and corrected and may require emendation to make sense of non- sense readings. Naturally, when two or more manuscripts are extant for a writing, textual criticism becomes more urgent, for inevitably numerous variants emerge between and among the witnesses. Each manuscript, of course, has a history – largely unknown – of varying influences on and enriching interpreta- tions of its content. Scribes and readers have imposed these on the text, shap- ing the text during transmission. Every biblical manuscript, after all, reflects

NovTSup 113; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 118. See H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (London: British Museum, 1938).